In my home country of soviet canuckistan, they actually just mandated Phonics be returned to our canuckistani indoctrination centers.
Phonics started being knocked out like 40 years ago. It's only recently that the sheer stupidity of whole word reading has become unavoidable and we've seen some pushback.
@matrix I ain't seen this yet but I heard they're getting rid of phonics in schools. No more sounding out words, they just teach the fucking word, so if a kid runs into a word in the wild they haven't seen before they'll have no idea how to sound it out. They're turning English into a language of characters, where we no longer use letters very much and words are taken as a single thing, not an assemblage of parts called letters. They're doing speech control, so when someone reads the word "freedom" they will only know it's definition through the party, they will not have the knowledge to infer qualities of the word based on it's similarities to other word parts, they're trying to take etymology away from the masses, they're trying to bring back the lifestyle people had when everything important was in Latin, they're tired of impoverished families asking too many questions after getting too smart.